Guillotines. It’s time for guillotines. We’re way past pitchfork stage.
Let’s just fucking end them.
People, on average, are wealthier than they’ve ever been. Technology and living standards have improved so much for so many people. Those people are not going to do anything that would jeopardize their current living standard, nor their pursuit of even more wealth. They don’t hate billionaires, most of them wish they were billionaires themselves. If there’s anything they would get angry at billionaires for it would be the affordability crisis. Climate change is way down on the list of grievances, if it’s on the list at all. Climate change is an existential threat to their living standards, so they should care, but it’s a difficult threat for people to conceptualize.
Technology plays a role, but the big part of current wealth is the hundreds of “oil slaves” we each have in the West. On the downslope of the carbon pulse this is going to be extremely unpleasant to have to get used to having less of.
The techno-optimists would say that we can replace all of those “oil slaves” with “green energy slaves” (probably a combination of renewables and nuclear, fusion or otherwise). The optimists would say that the full transition to zero emissions energy is inevitable. I’m skeptical, myself. I think those optimists are oversimplifying at best and outright delusional at worst.
Renewable technology has come down in price significantly and more and more renewable electricity is being generated every year, but we’re still quite a ways away from green energy beginning to replace fossil fuels. Currently, zero emissions energy is just being added on top of fossil fuels, and it’s probably going to stay that way as long as we are operating within an infinite growth paradigm. Infinite growth requires infinite energy, so no energy source can go unutilized.
But I agree that we will likely hit some hard, physical limit to growth at some point, and when that happens the global economic system will experience an unprecedented crash. I don’t know when that will be, but when it does it will be a major inflection point for our species.
Agree. The other part I didn’t mention in the previous comment, is that on average, “people” aren’t really much better off because we tend to ignore the extraction of wealth from the Global South: and those people certainly aren’t better off on average, the bottom 50% of which have the same carbon budget as the top 1% of global population.
Barret .50s, tbh
The best pitchfork.
